Various types of material handling equipment exist for handling items across a wide range of facilities. Generally, such equipment includes mechanical and/or electrical components for the movement, storage, control, and/or protection of items throughout manufacturing, distribution, consumption, and/or disposal. In an example, conveyor systems are deployed within a storage facility to move items within the storage facility.
Upon installation in a facility, the material handling equipment is typically commissioned. The commissioning may involve checking the actual installation against an installation design. Further, in operation, the material handling equipment is routinely checked for maintenance.
Generally, commission and/or maintenance checks involve visual inspection and review of documents to ensure the quality of the installation and operation. However, such checks may be subjective and may fail to identify certain unacceptable conditions. Additionally, the more complex the installation is, the more difficult the checks become, thereby further exacerbating the quality of the checks. In certain situations, the checks may be even hard to complete unless complex equipment is used. In turn, lower quality checks may result in a lower quality of installation and/or operation, thereby increasing the risk of improper item handling and lowering the throughput of the material handling equipment.
To illustrate, consider an example of a long conveyor belt (e.g., length of multiple miles) running at different heights through a large warehouse. A visual inspection may be time consuming and subjective. The inspection quality further deteriorates for portions of the conveyor belt running at a high height (e.g., higher than the eye level of an inspector). Accordingly, many unacceptable installation or operation conditions may be missed, resulting in improper handling operations and failures.